Volume 2, Issue 2 (2017)
ESSAY
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"Behind its mask (decently covering her for the occasion, so that her reactions would not become public property), her face glowed with thoughts utterly unlike those that usually occupied her: at church, say, or while doing the household accounts. (For Elizabeth Stampe, née Burbage, was married to a butcher in Shoreditch, and so since the age of seventeen had been responsible for the daily administration of a domestic economy based on beef and blood.) What seized her that day at the playhouse was an overwhelming and all-illuminating awareness of her own humanity:
"I am a human being, caught in time, alive now -- and now -- and now." |
SHORT FICTION
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"The girl leans over the cracked clamshell fountain, green lichen creeping up the cement surface, and sees her curly black hair tousled in the wind. A vague metal taste rises from the stagnant waters and she spots movement in the reflection of the trees overhead, but when she turns there is nothing. The lime leaves rattle against each other as if their paper skins whisper with the wind, but there is nothing beyond them. She turns her attention back to the fountain. Shadows appear, wavering in the water-mirror and she leans in, dipping her fingers in the clear well, rippling its surface. But above, there is only bright green and white, a cerulean flume streaming through. She watches her reflection and the nameless things watching her watch the reflection and it is then she knows how things can both be and not be all at once."
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POETRY
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"... Serpents slither into the innocent
notions and oceans of ideas horizon lines ships and wishes irate lies smiling from behind pretty eyes..." |
POETIC ESSAY
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"Stop, revise, dragonflies breathe through their anus. You don’t want anyone to think you are comparing yourself to that, do you? Make it a damselfly. The word sounds more feminine, and they are slimmer, their eyes are spaced further apart, therefore they are more winsome and if you insist on using insects as metaphors why not choose the prettiest one? And have you not always wanted to be a damsel in distress, rescued by a fetching knight on a handsome steed?"
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POETRY
"Today I drift through an apple orchard,
Calloused and scabbed,
Branches bent in silver and gold
While the sun sets on the prairie,
Rousing the dead.
Some nights
It rouses me too."
Calloused and scabbed,
Branches bent in silver and gold
While the sun sets on the prairie,
Rousing the dead.
Some nights
It rouses me too."
Customized illustrations for all published pieces are provided by Evgenia Barsheva.